Monday, December 21, 2015

Review: LAST SHIFT (2014) [Paul's Take]

Our first review!Farewell,
boring life of non-blogging mediocrity!Hello sparkling new life of blogging mediocrity! This is it, the first installment of our Netflix Horror Challenge. The challenge? To watch, review, discuss, and wallow in completely random
recent horror films off Netflix streaming until we can take no more.

We currently have, let me see, ZERO readers.But if we manage to snare/trick/stumble into
one (that would be you, right now, reading this, unless you’re me or Joe), we’d
love to hear your thoughts on these gems of horror as well.Ready?Ok!

So everyone welcome to the stage . . .“Last Shift.”Hmmm, “Last Shift,” does it feel good to be
picked first?Before you start crowing
around the kickball field, remember . . . luck of the draw, big fella.You are, after all, going to have to answer
for why your heroine, Jessica Loren (played with stoic rigor by Juliana
Harkavy), is attacked by rolling office chairs.Or the scene where those office chairs construct themselves into a giant
Voltron-like ur-office chair. You’ve got
a lot of office-chair-splainin’ to do, so don’t get ahead of yourself.

Even chairs like to sit on chairs

The premise of “Last Shift” is a solid set-up for
psychological horror.A rookie cop on
the first day of her job gets the task of watching over a deserted police
station for what turns out to be a shitty night.Figuratively AND literally.A homeless man pees in the lobby.A bathroom appears to have been the site of a
police-officer-poo-throwing contest.Excrement
abounds. Coincidentally, a hazmat team
is scheduled to arrive later that night.So even though the film begins with scatological yuckiness, help is on
the way!

Throughout the long night that follows for Jessica, I found
myself perversely worried about the hazmat team.Was Jessica going to be able to get them to
clean the bathroom without extra charge, like “oh, while you’re here, somebody
shat all over the walls in here, can you take care of it?”Seems like a downright rude thing to say to
anyone, unless, of course,they’re a hazmat team.I bet they get it all the time.They’re trained for this shit!

Less literally, Jessica’s shitty night consists of discovering
that the deserted police station has a serious case of haunting.Even though it doesn’t wander far from this
single setting, “Last Shift” manages a brisk pace and effective suspense by focusing
tightly on Jessica’s point-of-view and exploiting tried-and-true basic
creep-outs.Disturbing masks and bloody
corpses, hell yes!When Jessica pins the
homeless guy face down on the ground and the back of his head turns into
a scary play-dough face?Scary as get out, but also, you know, kind of
intellectually stimulating at the same time.It makes you
think: if your eyes were in the back of your head would it still be the back of
your head?

But for all these sweet horror moments, there are also big
whiffs.The haunting ghosts sing a hokey
kumbaya sing-a-long.Someone has
written, gasp, a word on the
ceiling!The nice flirty cop that turns
out to only have half his head?Solid
statement on the perils of dating.The
creepy cop that orders Jessica to turn away from him and just sort of stand
there?Inexplicable.“Last Shift” flings a lot of hazmat material
at the proverbial wall and only some of it sticks.

As Jessica eventually finds out, she is being stalked by a
homicidal cult of ghostly redneck pig farmers who committed suicide in the
station sometime prior.They don’t
worship Satan, as they point out meaninglessly in one of the flashbacks, but
rather the “King of Hell” who apparently is like Satan’s granddaddy or landlord
or something.The pig farmer thing is
totally gym shoes—it makes for some interesting police-swine double entendres
throughout the film—but the “King of Hell”?Merely a Satan substitute that differs in no material way from Satan
except that he’s got a stupid name.It’s
like the McDowell’s of evil deities.

Yet, for all the ideas that don’t work, many do.And the fact that there’s so much—suicidal
cult members, hanging masked people, corpses rolling around in their office
chairs like the boss is out and you’re playing office chair football (if you
haven’t played office chair football, you haven’t lived), a crawling naked disfigured golem girl, a late 80s office
phone that vibrates, a really long
hair in a sandwich—means that this film never slows down.Sure, not all of it works, but the bizarre
one-damned-thing-after-another parade of scares keeps things going at a pretty
good clip, right up until the somewhat deflating ending.

The most adhesive of these thrown-at-the-wall ideas, though,
comes during a harrowing scene midway through the film when Jessica gets
trapped in a holding cell with the homeless urinator.The lights go out and she loses her
flashlight.Then someone or something
turns the flashlight on her.Blinded by
the light, she tries to muster courage in her I’m-in-control voice—“you need to
give me my flashlight.”This hits the
right note—Jessica trying to maintain the façade of authority in the face of
unexplainable menace.The jump scares
that follow are well-orchestrated, but maybe give away too much, because the
rest of the film seems like an attempt to recapture that moment by just adding
more gore and more masks.They don’t
stick nearly as well.

Random sidenote: was I alone in being distracted by the
sliding archival shelves?They are those
handcrank-type shelves that you see in some libraries.You know, the ones with catalog numbers on
them like “PS1200.M3-PS2200.R” so you can tell what is in each shelf?Thing is, the shelves behind Jessica in this
haunted police station have only a single catalog number on two shelves, and
what’s more, THE CALL NUMBER IS THE EXACT SAME NUMBER.This bothered the library-goer in me, because at first I thought it was
a clue (“this library only has one book,” said ominously, “and it’s checked out.”) but as the film wore on
it felt more and more like a mistake.Which means that they took the time to print out a sign for the shelves
(they didn’t even need a sign,
really), but when they realized they needed multiple different signs, said
“fuck it” and just used the same one twice.It’s that sort of consideration for fine detail followed by an absolute
neglect of executing or following up on it that is “Last Shift.”

But where is D/6 399 QTT-25 88821Y????

Ultimately, the hazmat team does show up to my relief.But then is hastily dispatched.Thus the crowning achievement
of the King of Hell is exacted: he manages to off the only folks trained and willing to
clean that bathroom.Now who will clean
up your mess?Bwa ha ha ha!Evil landlord indeed!

My Questions for Joe:

PH: The prostitute says she has to go “make donuts” at one point.Is this another cop stereotype provocation or did I miss something?

JD: According to Urban Dictionary, ‘time to make the doughnuts’ means it’s time to get to work, and it comes from an old Duncan Donuts commercial in which the donut maker would say, well, you know. Also, for what it’s worth, the top related words include:

I actually clicked on ‘anal rape’ just to see if there were some hip, new way the kids were using these days, like “That bike is so anal rape!” but no, it still means the same thing as it ever did. Also, ‘best time ever’ HAS no definition. The mysteries just don’t STOP with this movie!

PH: Why doesn’t Jessica fix her hair?

JD: I’m pretty sure at one point she gets locked in a prison cell with a hobo, whom she tases into unconsciousness, then loses her flashlight. Then it gets FOUND by a specter that whispers creepy shit, and shines light on the hobo just so you can see he’s not the one with the flash light, which is IMPOSSIBLE, and terrifying. And she eventually gets out of there, and the first thing she does…is go back to her desk and work on her Police Training Manual some more. Maybe she’s looking for the section on ghost busting, but I don’t know why she does anything she does after the first 10 minutes.

No! Wait, because in the first 10 minutes, she finds a creepy ass room, and in the very next scene she’s sitting there eating a sandwich in it! And then, she finds a hair in her mouth, except it’s an extremely long black hair, which she pulls like three feet out of her mouth. That’s what you get for eating a sandwich in a creepy room, and on top of that, it’s obviously her hair, so she only has herself to blame. And finally, maybe that’s why she doesn’t fix her hair, because she’s already had enough of it for lunch! BEST TIME EVER

PH: Discuss the transcendent evil of office furniture.

JD: I spent most of the movie thinking things like “I would be OUT of there. I would call for back up, from my car, because I would be out.” I started thinking that during the bathroom scene, and basically never stopped. Except for the chair scene. I could take a chair. And watching her get beat up by one was like watching one of those dramatized, metaphorical struggles with drug addiction from D.A.R.E commercials when we were kids. Were those a thing? Because that felt like what I was watching. She didn’t really lose to a chair. She was really losing to crystal meth.

PH: Was that “Su-eee” decent enough by pig farming standards?

JD: To tell you the truth, I didn’t make the pig farmer, cop, sow connection as quickly or as completely as you did. You pigged up on it! Snort.

PH: Explain the immaculateness of the eyebrows of the female ghostly redneck non-Satan-worshiping pig farmers.

JD: Well, they clearly never fought a possessed office chair, or at least one of those eyebrow hairs would NOT have been on flique.